How to stop Shopify emails from going to spam with smarter segments

When marketing emails land in spam, they don’t just waste effort. They also hurt your store’s reputation with email providers. Over time, that means even customers who want to hear from you may stop seeing your emails at all.

One simple way to improve deliverability is to send campaigns only to people who have shown interest recently. In the Shopify Email app, you can do this by creating an audience segment based on who opened past emails.

This article walks through the process, with some practical tips for choosing the right time frames and settings.

Why engaged audiences matter for deliverability

Email services like Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo use engagement signals to decide whether to place emails in the inbox or in spam. If too many recipients ignore your campaigns or delete them, your future emails may get filtered.

On the other hand, if you send primarily to people who open and click, providers see you as a sender worth trusting. That improves:

• Open rates and click-through rates

• Long-term sender reputation

• Customer satisfaction (fewer unsubscribes or spam reports)

In practice, that means trimming your list to focus on customers who still engage.

Step-by-step: Building an engaged audience in Shopify Email

Shopify Email has a simple way to filter customers based on how they’ve interacted with your past messages. Here’s how to set it up:

1. Go to Customers in your Shopify admin.

2. Click Add filter.

3. Paste this query:

   shopify_email.opened MATCHES (
     date > -[xyz]m,
     count >= 1
   )

4. Replace [xyz] with a number of months that makes sense for your sending frequency.

   • If you send monthly, 6 months back is reasonable.

   • If you send weekly, 3 months back might be better.

5. Set the count to match your chosen window. For example:

   • At least 1 open if your window is short

   • At least 2–3 opens if your window is longer

6. (Optional) Narrow it further with an email provider domain filter, for example:

   AND customer_email_domain = 'gmail.com'

7. Apply and save the query as a segment.

8. Send future campaigns only to this segment, via the Email app.

This approach helps ensure that every campaign goes to people who are more likely to engage.

When to use this method

This kind of segmentation works well when:

• Your open rates have dropped and you suspect spam filtering

• You’ve built a large list but don’t know who still cares about your emails

• You’re preparing for a major campaign (like Black Friday) and want clean deliverability

• You need to rebuild reputation after past deliverability issues

It’s less useful if you’re already sending only to a small, highly engaged base.

FAQ

Do I lose sales by cutting my list? Not usually. The people filtered out weren’t opening your emails anyway. Focusing on engaged readers often improves total conversions because more emails reach inboxes.

What if I don’t use Shopify Email? Other tools like Klaviyo or Mailchimp also allow engagement-based segmentation. The exact filters differ, but the principle is the same.

Can I win back unengaged subscribers later? Yes, you can run re-engagement campaigns to inactive contacts. Just don’t mix them into your main marketing list until they’ve shown interest again.

Does this help with click rates too? Yes. Higher open rates usually lead to higher clicks, since your content is reaching people who actually want it.

Wrapping up

Keeping your marketing emails out of spam isn’t only about writing good content. It’s about sending to the right people. By creating an engaged audience segment in Shopify Email, you improve both deliverability and performance.

This is a small adjustment in setup, but it has a big effect on how many customers actually see your messages.